Friday, 1 September 2017

DPR Korea will not be cowed

by our Asia Affairs correspondent

ANGLO-AMERICAN imperialism stepped up its threats against the Democratic
People’s Republic of Korea this week following the successful firing of
a DPRK missile that flew over Japan before falling into the Pacific
Ocean as planned. US President Donald Trump warned that “all options are
on the table” while Theresa May refused to rule out future British
military action against the DPRK when asked by the media on the eve of
her talks with the Japanese government in Tokyo.

Meanwhile the US imperialists have been carrying out atomic weapon tests
of their own. This week the US National Nuclear Security Administration
(NNSA) announced the successful flight tests of its B61-12 gravity
nuclear bombs operating in a non-nuclear assembly. The NNSA say the
tests were carried out to check the “aircraft’s capability to deliver
the weapon” and it coincides with reports that some US senators are
pushing Trump to withdraw from the 1987 INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear
Forces) Treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union to
eliminate cruise and short-range ballistic missiles,

The renewed testing of the DPRK deterrent was the legitimate response to
the start of new US military exercises in the occupied south of the
Korean peninsula, which simulate an invasion of Democratic Korea. It was
also clearly intended as a warning to Japan, the weakest imperialist
country in the world and little more than an American vassal, of the
consequences of slavishly supporting US aggression in Korea.

Though the DPRK has fired missiles over Japan in the past the two
previous occasions, in 1998 and 2009, they were to launch satellites.
This time Japan activated its public early warning system and
reactionary Japanese premier Shinzo Abe called the test an
“unprecedented and a grave threat”.

But the fact is that Democratic Korea had not broken any international
law by conducting the test as the missile flew above the main
atmosphere. There is nothing to prohibit extra-atmospheric overflight of
sovereign territory. Sovereignty does not extend beyond the atmosphere.

At the United Nations the 15-strong Security Council, which includes
People’s China and the Russian Federation, unanimously condemned
Monday’s missile test and called for the immediate end of “such
“outrageous actions”.

But the Chinese repeated their call for the Americans and their south
Korean puppets to halt their military exercises and remove the Terminal
High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) missile system from south Korea in
exchange for the DPRK’s halt of missile and nuclear weapon tests. Russia
supports this “double freeze” proposal but it has been dismissed out of
hand in Washington.

Trump began threatening north Korea as soon as he stepped into the White
House demanding that the DPRK abandon its nuclear deterrent while
offering nothing in return. In August the Americans forced the UN
Security Council to rubber-stamp more sanctions while Trump raged that
Democratic Korea would face “fire and fury ... the likes of which the
world has never seen” if it did not do the bidding of US imperialism.

But in the DPRK everyone knows the fate of countries like Libya and
Iraq, which disarmed under the mistaken belief that this would spare
them from the horrors of imperialist invasion and regime change. No one
in the DPRK takes any takes any notice of threats coming from the
imperialists who devastated the country in an attempt to overthrow the
people’s government during the Korea War.

The DPRK has been under American sanctions of one form or another since
the end of the Korean War in 1953. But despite unrelenting hostility
from US imperialism and its regional lackeys, Democratic Korea has
continued to advance along the road of socialist construction.

The United States should reconsider its aggressive stance and know that
no economic pressure, threat or blackmail will overthrow the Democratic
People’’s Republic of Korea, said an editorial in Rodong Sinmun (Daily Worker), the voice of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea.

The DPRK’s self-defence measures continue, among them the development of
nuclear abilities, while Washington, in collusion with south Korea and
Japan, carries out military exercises off the coasts near Democratic
Korea.

“Our country does not belong to the category of those that are
frightened or subjugated to the pretensions of the White House” the
Korean communist daily said.

“Our position is unchanged that as long as the hostile policy and
nuclear threat of the United States against DPRK is not radically
eliminated, we will never put the nuclear deterrent at the negotiating
table, or will step back from the road to bolster up the nuclear armed
forces.”